In 2025, ProPublica journalist Renee Dudley confirmed that Microsoft provided technical support to the US Department of Defense through China, America's biggest cyber adversary. This investigation ultimately changed US government policy.
The journalist first discovered an ad offering $18 to $28 to hire Americans as “digital assistants” for China-based tech support companies. She then simply searched LinkedIn for people who had responded to the ad.
He discovered that at the time, “Behind the scenes, and unnoticed by U.S. government users, not a single person responded,” the ProPublica podcast explains.
Pairs are formed… The engineer based in China is the one who knows how to fix a problem. For their part, they write the code to solve a problem and send it to the digital assistant in the US who then simply copies and pastes the code…
All this so they can follow the government's rule: "that you must be a US citizen or permanent resident to handle sensitive data."
To confirm this, the ProPublica reporter simply had to enter the words “Microsoft” and “companion” into the U.S. Patent Office’s search bar. She found patents on digital companions—along with the names of current and former Microsoft employees listed as inventors.
Had the government approved this practice?
“I could see what Microsoft actually told the government,” the journalist says in the podcast, “And there was no mention of using foreign engineers and certainly no mention of China.”
Η ProPublica history was published on Tuesday, and by Friday “Microsoft said it had stopped using China-based engineers to support Department of Defense cloud systems.”
The US Department of Defense on the other hand “also launched an investigation to examine whether any of Microsoft’s engineers had jeopardized national security.”
Although the press releases will range from very select to rare, I said I'd pass...because sometimes the editors hide.
